Tech at Night: Cybersecurity action in the Senate, Soros squad on the move

Team Soros, assemble! Remember when it was “wrong” for AT&T to get spectrum by buying T-Mobile? Remember when I said it should be allowed because the Obama administration and the radicals were making it too hard to get spectrum any other way? Vindication, baby: The left unites to fight Verizon buying spectrum another way. Before the excuse was to prevent industry consolidation. Well, Verizon is buying from cable companies, not wireless phone providers.

Note that Verizon has strongly refuted their claims, including the dangerous, crypto-socialist idea that the FCC should be allowed to dictate to Verizon and Comcast an alternate transaction. Such as one to benefit T-Mobile.

The Cybersecurity war is on now in the Senate. The House passed CISPA along with Darrell Issa’s FISMA reform. CISPA won’t past the Senate over an Obama veto threat though, and given the strong Republican opposition to Lieberman-Collins in the Senate, I can’t imagine it’d pass the House. So the fight is on to undermine Republican bills.

Incredibly, simply incredibly, it’s been declared that the McCain-Hutchison-Johnson SECURE IT is worse than Lieberman-Collins, even though the latter bill is the one that gives the President ’emergency’ powers over the Internet, in a stunning threat to fundamental property rights in America. The Internet Kill Switch is there in all but name, but once again, attacking Republicans is paramount with these folks.

I’m also concerned that John Kyl and Roy Blunt are threatening to undermine the coalition behind John McCain on this. It’s an old point, but if you can get John McCain, Ron Johnson, and Kay Bailey Hutchison behind the same bill, and they’re all opposed to the Democrat alternative, then it’s time for the whole caucus to fall in line, because it’s probably a common sense bill. And it is.

LightSquared goes boom. Losing Sprint was too much. I’m still torn on this. The firm’s opposition to FCC transparency was a great, big, red flag that something was amiss, but greater 4G competition would have been nice. Also, LightSquared’s satellite service is the kind of thing that’s useful to put pressure on other firms like the oft-maligned HughesNet.